Melty Blood/MBTL/Vlov Arkhangel/Strategy

From Mizuumi Wiki
Jump to navigation Jump to search

General

Vlovmoon.pngVlovmeter.png

See these icons? You should be looking at them a LOT. Moon drive activation is useful as Vlov for anything, for neutral, defense, pressure, high damage combos, setups, clash cancels from specials, you name it. His meter is also useful; his metered combos are stellar and he has great pressure extenders using meter (22C), and it cheaply enables his air unblockable setup from fireballs in neutral.

Neutral

When your opponent is far away from you, they’ll obviously want to get in. Vlov is predisposed to holding his ground and using fireballs and stomp to cover the space the opponent wants to move through to get in his face. Your goal is NOT to hit them with fireballs, if they’re properly respecting you they will literally never get hit at this range (a lot of people don’t respect though so enjoy your free damage). However, you WANT them to respect you either just by moving slowly or downbacking, because it enables you to do a couple of things. The most important thing is it forces them to stay past A rekka range for a while. Inside this range, you lose a lot of your best tools and are mostly forced to play defense. Once they’re respecting you, it will take them much longer to transition from fullscreen to close and gives you time to threaten them with rekkas. If they respect you a lot, you can also force them to take risks by using your newfound free time to recuperate resources. As Vlov is a resource reliant character, he can use time given to him to charge in relative safety to get resources back. When this happens, if your opponent doesn’t want you to just get all your resources back, they’ll be forced to hurry up and threaten you. You can also use respect given to you to move forwards. Vlov isn’t great at moving backwards, but he does still need to do it, and so he needs the space for it. If your opponent is offering you the space you can take the initiative and move forwards into your ideal midrange to threaten them with the harder to respect rekkas instead, and get away from the corner. It’s incredibly important to remember one of the most effective methods of going away from your opponent is to run directly under or over them so all of a sudden you’re a full screen away with little time for them to deal with it, and remember to fake doing something like this every so often to throw your opponent for a loop and catch them committing to sniping you.

Of course, all of these options eventually lead to your opponent reaching the midrange. At this range, you can effectively threaten a lot of what they do with your great rekkas and 5C, strong air buttons and somewhat below average but still serviceable mobility. However, if you feel your opponent is encroaching on your space, you have a couple of not great but still useful options to move backwards. You can j.7[C]: this option is strong against people going for aggressive aerial approaches and confirms really nicely, but is vulnerable to rununders or just waiting, and if you’re too slow you’ll still get clipped. You can also IABD j.B, which is better at covering the grounded angle and is very disjoint, however you don’t move very far for how long it takes and how low to the ground you are thanks to j.B being 10f and his air backdash being quite slow. You can also ground backdash, which is very slow but is also quite long, so if you’ve got free time and want space quick without covering yourself, you can backdash. It’s important to remember again that rather than going backwards, you can also go over or under your opponent to steal their side of the screen if you’ve run out of space. This option is usually preferable for Vlov just because his forward movement is notably better than his backwards movement.

At close range, you’re basically playing defense, so see the defense section.

Now in all of these facets of Vlov neutral, you might make a mistake. As any other zoner, this may result in your opponent getting in, but Vlov has the ability to nullify this by using a cool universal tool called moondrive activation. As any other character, you might whiff a 2C and have to wait out the recovery. But for Vlov, because he uses specials a LOT, he can whiff cancel into moon drive which leaves him nearly completely safe and ready to act, which is HUGE for his gameplan. While this is his primary use for moon drive, don’t overuse it as you should be saving it for when you really need it.

Vlov also has a stellar ability to convert blocked grounded moves into pressure. Thanks to 22C my beloved, he can burn meter (or moon drive if you’re so inclined, but as said before, better used for other things) to get advantage enough to dash in after a lot of things and run his game. 22C is also what you use on hit to convert a lot of these options when they’re far away or uncomfortable, so it’s a very useful move to use in a lot of situations, but try not to do it with a gap or whiff it unless you hate meter and love gambling.

Also suppose your opponent is content to just jump forward and block your fireballs. Oh No! Fortunately, Vlov has 214C. 214C is air unblockable, so you can quickly cancel fireballs that are blocked by an airborne opponent into 214C for an unblockable setup. The reward of this is pretty good too. Very good to be aware of, makes respecting Vlov fireballs much harder. Be wary of the spacing though, this setup is very particular about exactly where your opponent is so you’ll have to feel out the distance and height they can be at for this to work, and your opponent will be keeping this in mind too, so make sure to mix up your ranges so they can’t comfortably calculate where they can and can’t block in the air. This and 22C are the reasons why you should always strive to have at least one bar for your neutral game. He can also do the same thing by cancelling fireball into moon drive and then 4BC, which is a higher cost, higher reward and slightly smaller range option to keep in mind.

Something else to note is that your opponent may fall into a habit of shielding your fireballs and then B countering to try and neutral skip. In this case, you have a couple of options. The first is, you can chicken block their B counter. If you’re low enough when you block it, they’re super minus and you can get a fairly decent punish starter on them (this is generally the preferable punish option). You can also 3C their B counter. If you’re too early this might give you 2C and you’ll be sad, too late and you’ll get counterhit, but timed right you get a free punish into a cool route, so keep an eye out. If you haven’t recovered by the time they B counter, you can do a delay BC counter to punish their B counter easily and get a full confirm for big damage. TLDR don’t let them get away with B counters, put the fear of god into them. That being said, B counter can be hard to react to, and getting hit by it isn’t the end of the world as it doesn’t confirm on normal hit and it’s only 0 on block (which isn’t great but like I said, not the end of the world), so don’t worry too much about always killing B counters if it hampers your gameplay.

Of course, this is just a rough guide as to how you should be playing between ranges. Feel free to experiment and muck around with various options and callouts to see what floats your boat. Vlov is a very flexible character and has a lot of tools for various situations that may or may not have been detailed in the individual moveset descriptions but not mentioned here.

Pressure

When considering how to run Vlov pressure, it’s very important to keep in mind that Vlov’s specials are his bread and butter for how his pressure is run. His only forward moving normal is 5[C], and all his normals have subpar frame data, so this man is not running standard rebeat pressure. In lieu of this, he instead has possibly the most versatile suite of pressure specials in the game.

Getting his relevant normals out of the way first, 2C is generally the splitting point for when you start to run your actual game. Once you hit 2C at the longer ranges, you’ve only got one high shield crush and two shield low crush options left to go, and once you’re out of those your opponent no longer has to guess any more. The low shield crush options are 5[C] and 6[C]. 5[C] is very much preferable, as it leads to a hell of a lot more damage, and you can still rebeat or cancel into 6[C] after. However, once 6[C] is out of the way, you can’t rebeat to 5[C] and have no overhead specials, so the opponent can just low shield, so do keep this in mind.

As for low specials, you have two options, the first and more relevant of which is 22B. (Below is old, will be updated soon)

When understanding Vlov pressure, the general trend of “specials are just as if not more important than normals” continues. Vlov’s best rebeat data is -3 from his 2C and 5C, he has late whiff cancel windows on his A normals (which are also slow) and he gets pushed out pretty far by his normals. That’s not to say his normals are bad for pressure; they just aren’t the key to success, they’re more so the glue that binds together his pressure. He can use his normals to hold his opponent down while he pushes himself into an idea range, to extend his truestring longer than he could with just specials to make the opponent antsy, to move into rapid beat 2 for massive blockstun etc. Your specials are very important, but don’t forget about your normals.

In Lumina, I’m sure plenty of people will tell you about how strong shield and heat are. A strength that Vlov shares with only a few characters is that he can use his specials to shift ranges quickly and often to threaten throw and bait heat unpredictably. His rekkas, which are already incredible neutral tools, step forward a little bit for each swing. This combined with the inherent pushback on the move means rekkas somewhat stabilise toward a certain range from the opponent when they are cornered, which can be changed by delaying or not doing the second part of the rekka. At this range, both the 3rd strike and throw from rekka whiff, but those aren’t very good anyway. The important thing is that even if the first part of rekka whiffs when your opponent heats at this range, if you delay or don’t do the second strike (or are just spaced out far enough), you don’t step forward enough for heat to hit you, and can punish heat easily. It is also possible to stagger rekkas into each other (e.g. 214A, 214Adl.A, 214B) to threaten mashing and jumping and make them either just block or try to gamble out. Using that threat, you can create opportunities for yourself to do more threatening things in pressure. You can also use 214[B]/4BC to threaten at much longer ranges, and also threaten a pressure resetting followup with EX cancel or MD cancel on block for close up plus frames. The last thing to mention is that Vlov does get a little bit of canned mix from 214XX4X vs 214XXd.X, but it’s not that great and requires you to be at a range that is otherwise not quite ideal.

The next important tool in Vlov pressure is 22X. 22X could be considered a rekka as well, as there is both 22A~A and 22B~B to contend with, so you can use that to scare people out of mashing. 22A can be used a lot like you might use 214A, however 22A is different in that it only pushes your opponent away and not you, it vacuums them in on the second hit, and it is significantly more minus on both hits. However, 22A has the benefit of effortlessly killing backdash attempts at all ranges, and also punishing heats that are done further out thanks to it being longer than 214A. 22B is a bit more unique, as it is a very slow special that hits low on both hits and most importantly is 0 on block for both hits (or slightly minus on the second hit in ice). This means that if they block it, you can use it to shift them around either closer or further from you, delay to catch mashing and jumping, use it to reset pressure under the threat of 22B~B or linking into rekka or a normal etc. The big weakness of this move is that it being very slow means it is prone to being shielded, but when used correctly it can be a big boon to your pressure. It also has issues when done at further ranges at around ⅓ screen it becomes -3, which is much worse for obvious reasons considering the main strength was the frame advantage. 22C is the knot that ties Vlov pressure together. If you’ve overstayed your welcome with 214x staggers or you’ve just done 22A raw close up, press 22C for the freest conversion of 1 bar into plus frames of your life. 22C is +16 on block which means you can ground or airdash button to pressure reset or do all kinds of wacky stuff. As a Vlov player you want to have meter for pressure and this is why. The world is your oyster. 2BC is the final 22 series special, and its usage is quite simple; in the corner, it’s quick and easy plus frames, and in midscreen, it pushes back the opponent so far it’s unbelievable.

Your final pressure special is your fireballs, 236X. 236A/B and 236X~[A]/[B] are both plus, the latter especially so (ice 236A/B isn’t plus point blank but at further ranges it is). Don’t use the uncharged fireball followups on block unless you intend to EX or MD cancel as they are very very minus. While fireball isn’t air unblockable like rekka is, it basically is with 1 bar (see neutral section), so you can still threaten jumps with it. 6BC, while slow is also incredibly plus and moreso in fire (+31!!!!), so use that to get plus frames on the go for pressure resets.

Of course, beyond these specials you have standards things you can do in pressure. IADs that might branch into empty low/throw or a second jump to bait things, redash in a gap to threaten strike or throw, manual baiting or shield OS to beat heat or dps, all standard things that a lot of characters can do. Make sure you experiment with these kinds of things as the wide array of specials and resource usages he has makes his pressure very versatile and full of little tricks you can pull out to mess with your opponent.

The biggest challenge you’ll have to overcome when structuring Vlov pressure is (a mystery for now)

Defense

Vlov's defense is… not stellar. His Arc Drive is his only invul move and is slow despite the high number of invul frames relegating it to mostly punishing things and combos, his moon skills all have varying issues holding them back combined with moon skill clashing being fairly punishable in standard defense anyway, and his buttons are notably slow. However, that doesn’t mean he’s a lost cause. His main ground to ground abare buttons are 2A, 2B, 5C and 214A. 2A is his quickest button so it’s “good” for close range scrambles, but still below average. 2B is a very solid button for the range it hits at and has lots of disjoint, and it catches some IADs, meaning he can mash it without huge amounts of risk. However it is still quite slow and doesn’t catch all IADs so don’t get too comfortable with it. 214A is the same speed as 2B but takes a bit longer to input and has longer recovery if it does whiff, and also leads to less pressure if it’s blocked. 214A also extends his hurtbox a little bit more horizontally and a lot more vertically than 2B so that’s important to note. 214A is also better at catching higher IADs but will lose to quicker ones that 2B can beat due to the second hit coming out slower. You can also use 5B and 5C to catch people jumping or IADing at you thanks to their taller hitboxes, but 5B has less horizontal reach than 2B/214A/214B and 5C has more recovery than 2B and 5B but is very long to compensate.

Vlov also has the option of moon drive on wakeup. This at first seems like an appealing option, and depending on what your opponent is doing it definitely can be good, but for a character who loves to have moon drive available, burning it on wakeup just for safety can be very costly. Think very hard about whether to use this as a defensive option or not. Also, while noted earlier that Vlov moon skills are bad on defense, they aren’t completely useless. If you’re in moon drive anyway, they are an option that you can consider, just be very careful about using it.

Mostly though, defense as Vlov is all about patience. While his reward for getting out is great, he doesn’t have many specialised tools to do so. Use universal options like heat, shield and jumping to influence your opponent’s offensive habits and keep an eye out for an escape. A Note Regarding Shield: For Vlov, initiating shield situations can be a bit touch and go. While he gets above average reward for getting hits and for getting away from pressure, he has some weak areas in these sorts of interactions. For starters, in the event that he blocks a B counter, many other characters could take that +2 and run with it. However, since Vlov is out of range for 2A, he’s forced to 2B/C/214A or similar, which can be very unfortunate in certain matchups (such as Shiki) where the opponent can actively contest your options even if they’re minus because all your options are slower than theirs. Vlov is also disincentivised more so than others to use BC counter as he’d much rather use that moon gauge for other things if he had the choice. Keeping these factors in mind, think carefully about how you approach shield interactions.

How to Beat Vlov

Vlov Matchup Tips

Countermeasures for other players to take when fighting against Vlov.

All info sourced directly from Masoma's MBTL Vlov Options and Countermeasures Guide.


Vlov:

  • Stick close to Vlov at round start. Don't let him get too far from you. Jump around with him and stick on him.
  • Easy to reaction shield fireballs from mid-fullscreen. Use this to build MD, avoid chip damage, and regain health. Also incentivizes Vlov to zone less.
  • If Vlov spends meter to keep himself safe that is pretty good for you because he's losing resources.
  • Vlov with no resources has less threatening zoning and can't convert hits from fullscreen as well.
  • Vlov is a -3 rebeat character. His fastest midrange normals are 9f. There is about a 12 frame gap for you to challenge when he rebeats.
  • 6f 2A is his fastest mash. Many strings are very difficult for him to mash on.
  • No meterless reversals and only has arc drive as his invincible move.
  • If Vlov jumps start running at him. His air to ground options aren't amazing. Most characters with low to the ground normals will make j.B whiff.
  • B follow up on hit is usually a good situation for you. Vlov buttons are slower and you will likely win scrambles.
  • Grounded dashblocks can let you approach safely for the most part but he has ways to catch it. Some characters also have weaker dashblocks and don't cover enough distance.

Goal:

  • Get into shield BC range.
  • In range you can run at him if he focuses on the air (ideally striking with a low profile move to avoid 236B) or IAD/jump over his other projectiles
  • Shield projectiles and RPS between immediate BC/delay BC/immediate B/nothing. He has ways to beat each option ofc but he has to take a guess on what you're going to do.

Outside of BC range:

  • Max superjump range j.C to punish 22Xw 236C
  • Use shield BC to close space if you have spare MD to burn. Best done when you shield 236X. 22X is not as good to close in with BC.
  • Superjump and react to 236B with air shield or else die to air unblockables
  • Throw your own projectiles if you have them.


The Game
Getting Started
FAQ
Glossary
HUD & UI
Links
Customization
News & updates
The Battle System
Controls
Offense
Defense
Movement
Resources
Game Data
Characters
Shiki Tohno
Arcueid Brunestud
Akiha Tohno
Ciel
Hisui
Kohaku
Hisui & Kohaku
Miyako Arima
Kouma Kishima
Noel
Michael Roa Valdamjong
Vlov Arkhangel
Red Arcueid
Saber
Aoko Aozaki
Dead Apostle Noel
Mario Gallo Bestino
Powered Ciel
Neco-Arc
Mash Kyrielight
Ushiwakamaru
Monte Cristo